Georgia’s attorney general has responded to two motions from defense attorneys that call into question the state’s integrity in prosecuting an alleged criminal conspiracy behind protests against the controversial police training center colloquially known as “Cop City”.
The responses come on the heels of public pressure and media coverage that brought the motions to light.
In one case, John Fowler, the deputy attorney general, sent an email last week to the dozens of attorneys defending the 61 people accused of “racketeering”, to schedule visits by the end of July to the South River Forest near Atlanta – including the Cop City construction site and a public park where protesters camped for more than a year.
“We’ve been trying to schedule this visit since at least January,” defense attorney Xavier de Janon said. “It’s likely due to public pressure – the media, social media – that the state is finally allowing defense attorneys to see it.”
Fowler’s email followed De Janon’s motion filed in late June describing months of attempts to visit the forest, which the state calls a “crime scene”. The attorney petitioned Kimberly Esmond Adams, a Fulton county superior court judge, in the motion to dismiss all charges related to the forest due to the state’s stonewalling. In an 8 July story, the Guardian independently confirmed that other defense attorneys also hadn’t been able to schedule visits; one sent emails to Fowler “at least six times” about the matter, only to be ignored.
Adams ordered Fowler at a court conference in early May to schedule visits by the end of June, adding that the jury in an eventual trial may also need to do so. Fowler emailed defense attorneys, but never followed up to schedule visits, ignoring the judge’s deadline.
Meanwhile, construction on the $109m training center has continued apace, in effect changing some of the physical conditions on the ground forever, De Janon noted in his motion.
The other motion centering on Fowler’s behavior asserted that the state had violated attorney-client privilege by sharing emails between members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund, and their attorney. The Guardian independently confirmed that the deputy attorney general had shared them, as the motion alleges – and that he did the same with the communications of other defendants.
After coverage in the Guardian and elsewhere, the attorney general’s office responded to the motion last week, asserting: “The State certainly did not know that the defendant and attorney exchanged confidential communications over gmail …”
The series of events began with a Swat-style raid on the fund’s Atlanta house in May 2023, with Atlanta police seizing computers, cellphones and other devices. Don Samuel, the fund’s lead attorney, soon told Fowler that confidential, privileged emails and texts between the fund and himself were on the devices, according to the motion.
Over the next year, Samuel advised Fowler several times to “employ a filter team to ensure that privileged material is not reviewed”. The state never did, and separately obtained emails from Google for two of the fund’s three members. Atlanta police investigators have now seen these emails, and they have been shared with all the defense attorneys as part of discovery.
Samuel sought in his motion to have the judge hold a hearing on the matter and disqualify both the attorney general’s office and Atlanta police from the case.
After the state’s response last week, Samuel filed a reply: “The Attorney General’s Response questions, ‘How were we supposed to know that the communications in the Gmail accounts were privileged?’” He continues: “When defense counsel advised the prosecutors repeatedly that the laptops and phones and other devices seized have privileged communications [...] there was no way to misconstrue the message [...] . [D]id the prosecutors think perhaps there were pieces of paper or post-it notes tucked under the covers of the devices, or hidden in the inside of the devices?”
The reply asked the court again to hold a hearing on the matter.
Also last week, the attorney general’s office sent an email to defense attorneys with this request: “While we believe no attorney or legal professional would read communications between another attorney and client, it would appear that a specific request to not do so is needed.”
Journalist Will Potter – who details the federal government’s legal campaigns against environmental activists in his book, Green Is the New Red – said the recent events from the Cop City prosecution have been seen in previous court cases involving political protest, in the civil rights and environmental movements.
“Every step of the way … the government needs to be held accountable,” Potter said. “Journalists, activists, lawyers all need to be paying attention – just to get the government to do the bare minimum under the law, as required.”
